“That's what they called it.
A fast trip right down the ladder.
Right to the primal fear, the base anger.
I'm tellin' you, it was powerful stuff.
But I don't need to tell you.
You know.”
The Vietnam war was one of the most brutal wars in American history.
After the war, 271,000 veterans were diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
A person with PTSD can be afflicted with intense, disturbing emotions associated to their experiences
including: flashbacks of traumatic situations, nightmares, depression, and even feelings
of estrangement and disconnection from their surroundings and other people.
PTSD wasn’t considered to be a real mental health condition until 1980, 5 years after
the war ended.
When troops finally returned home, most could not receive help for the psychological trauma
they experienced, and in some cases, they could not gain help for physical trauma either.
Soldiers that suffered from exposure to Agent Orange would not be treated until 1991 when
the Agent Orange Act was passed which forced government institutions like Veteran Affairs,
or the VA, to give aid to veterans suffering from ailments.
Exposure to the herbicide can cause Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, Parkinson’s, prostate
cancer, respiratory cancer, and heart disease.
For 16 years Vietnam veterans were told that their health issues caused by exposure to
Agent Orange were from smoking or stress.
The VA’s denial of assistance and dismissal of hardship wasn’t the only trouble veterans
experienced when they returned home.
Many were greeted with anti war protests, they were spit on and were generally treated
with hostility and disrespect.
Vets quickly learned after the war to keep their status a secret to avoid further ridicule
and animosity from those that opposed the war.
Many suffered in silence, being told by doctors and friends to let go of the past and just
move on; never gaining any help, gratification, or respect for the hellish conditions they
endured.
So, in this context, the hellish conditions of Vietnam bled into a veteran’s civilian
life where they experienced a reality not too dissimilar from some surreal and disturbing
nightmare where they were plagued by their past trauma, developing drinking and drug
problems, becoming homeless, unable to hold jobs due to their physical ailments and committing
suicide.
Depression and anxiety picking away at their lives; haunted by a disjointed past disturbingly
distant from anything normal and simply adrift with little hope for their future.
“What can I say?
After the war I didn’t want to think.”
On top of all this there have been confirmed reports that during the Vietnam war the U.S
Army experimented with a wide range of drugs and narcotics on volunteer soldiers.
They tested the effects of tear gas, tranquilizers, and hallucinogens like LSD and, namely, the
drug mentioned at the end of Jacob’s Ladder, BZ.
BZ, or 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, is an incapacitating agent, meaning it causes temporary physiological
and psychological effects and renders those exposed unable to think clearly.
Its short term effects include dizziness, vomiting, unpredictable behavior, hallucinations,
delusions, and memory loss.
Veterans who underwent testing and prolonged exposure to BZ were plagued, decades later,
with numerous health problems such as cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and in some cases,
Parkinson's.
Veterans were never given any kind of assistance for their medical conditions and were forced
to keep the testing at the military base, Edgewood Arsenal, secret for years until documents
were declassified.
Veterans who have spoken out about the experiments at Edgewood said the military lured them into
volunteering with the promise of three day weekends and that they would be testing new
military equipment; there was never any mention of testing drugs.
When soldiers arrived at the arsenal they said it looked more like a hospital and if
they were having second thoughts, then the officers there would threaten them with imprisonment.
In Jacob’s Ladder, the equivalent to BZ is a drug referred to as “The Ladder”.
‘I’m in a top secret lab synthesizing mind altering drugs.
Not the street stuff, they had us isolating special properties.
The dark side.
Okay?
They wanted a drug that increased aggressive tendencies.”
The Ladder was supposed to bring out the ‘primal fear and base anger’ in Jacob’s battalion,
and the drug was successful in bringing out the soldier’s ‘dark side’, but their
baser impulses and primitive, irrational urges spiraled out of control.
“They decided to use the Ladder on one test battalion.
Yours.
Just an infinitesimal dose in the food supply, to prove its effectiveness in the field.
They were sure your unit would have the highest kill ratio in the whole goddamn offensive.
And you did, too.
But not the way they thought.”
The effects of the Ladder created human beings that were so out of touch with their normal,
conscious minds that they could kill without conscience or discrimination.
The ladder in the bible stretches from heaven to earth.
Two places, two minds, two options to choose between.
The same choice that Jacob has to make: to stay on earth, to be enveloped by the common
cultures and customs which separate him from his potential life in heaven, or to climb
the ladder, leaving behind the world.
Up or down.
Down is to be lost in an empty, hellish life on earth; bound to the pains and weaknesses
of the flesh, (running over body parts) enveloped by distortions and shades.
“You killed each other.”
“What?”
“It was brother against brother.
No discrimination.
You tore each other to pieces.”
Jacob was mortally wounded in the forest while under the effects of the drug, and because
of this he begins a perilous descent further down the Ladder, further into the darkest
parts of his unconscious mind: a dream-like-world of a veteran’s life after the war consisting
of his fears and sorrows, a place permeating with regret and pain, demons around every
corner.
A place where every unpleasant and disturbing thought, repressed throughout his life, is
made manifest.
Here, he has the potential, to remain for, perhaps, all eternity plummeting down the
endless spiral of his baser self; on down to the demons of his past and inner life.
What would happen if we were to forfeit our opportunity of choice?
Stuck with only the world around us, the influences of the external, of the genetic?
And where might we end up if we allowed these forces to determine our future?
Do we forego our free will when we choose nothing?
And if we are bound to the physical then are we living only a deterministic existence that
leads our consciousnesses inevitably to the same fate as our bodies?
To decay?
If the path that saves us is the one that leads to a home for our consciousness outside
of what’s visible, the visible being what is prone to entropy, then what happens when
we fail to follow that path?
Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you
will call it fate.”
Fate, according to Jung, is nothing more than our unconscious mind influencing our conscious
behavior and is the true source of our emotions, thoughts and actions.
The unconscious is also the arena of our psyches where repressed base impulses, thoughts and
feelings too unpleasant or irrational for our consciousness dwell.
The origin of all of these dark impulses is what he referred to as the shadow self.
Is it our shadows, then, that are propelling the unwieldy aspects of our lives forward?
Are past traumas and unfortunate events that played a part in shaping our identity, kept
in the shadow region of our minds, driving our lives in unfortunate directions even when
we are not aware of it?
What might this suggest about our ideals of trusting an external force to lead us to a
beneficial outcome?
We often want fate to be a positive force; if something happened, it was supposed to
happen, if we went through something, it was for a reason.
But what if the hardships and toiling on this earth really don’t add up to anything, they’re
just the interactions of our unconscious on our conscious, leading us into circumstances
with an, overall, unbeneficial outcome.
Within Jung’s theory of the unconscious is what he called the collective unconscious
which is the arena of the mind where primordial archetypes, images and ideas are stored.
Meaning that there is a fundamental part of our minds tied to everyone in our genetic
heritage.
So the things our ancestors did ripple into the present, their experiences and mental
wherewithal, in some way, alive inside of us.
The primordial, original sin, then, could be a hereditary trait passed down to us from
Adam where the curse of a permanent separation from God was inflicted on humanity.
Jacob is a common man, doing what is commonly done.
What does he do to deserve hell?
Within the context of the movie, in parallel with the bible, simply existing in a fallen
world, that long ago chose the pleasure derived from sin over a life spent with God, is all
it takes to go to hell because one is either actively choosing salvation or remaining in
the wide birthed path outside of it.
What if those who give up their opportunity of choice, opting for denial or a life outside
of God, are allowing their unconscious urges, the hereditary, primordial sin within them,
to direct them straight to hell?
What if hell is simply where we go after a life spent dismissing the negative aspects
stored up inside ourselves, after a lifetime of allowing the ideal of some kind of “fate”
to run our lives?
An eternity concocted by every vestige of primitive, irrational urges, guilt, sorrow
and pain that we were too ignorant to turn away from while we were still living.
“You ever read Meister Eckhart?
Eckhart saw Hell, too.
You know what he said?
The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your
memories, your attachments.”
Meister Eckhart was a German theologian from the middle ages and was best known for his
practical sermons on spiritual and psychological transformation.
His teachings primarily centered around detachment from the world, claiming that “a man should
be empty of all things except God”.
He said, "Whatever state we find ourselves in, whether in strength or in weakness, in
joy or in sorrow, whatever we find ourselves attached to, we must abandon.
. . . You must give up yourself, altogether give up self, and then you have really given
up ... By renouncing yourself first, you then have renounced all things.
... A man who loves God could give up the whole world as easily as an egg."
To relinquish control of our lives to base impulses, to common systems of thought that
are already dialed into what is disconnected from God--knowing for certain that such a
life leads to hell--would be quite foolish.
But once again the problem is not knowledge, it is doubt, denial and disbelief.
The external is malleable, pliable, bendable to a will, a playground of infinite possibilities,
quite a marvel, something to get wrapped up in, to continuously obsess over, to become
tangled up with, but the pressing issue is not about the beauty and pleasure stemming
from the physical, but about the temporariness and impermanence of our individual worlds,
of our lives.
We’ll one day lose all control, forever separating from the physical, so, according
to the film and the theology woven throughout the film, it is our responsibility while we
are still alive to choose which direction to take.
While the choice may seem obvious, to decide in heaven, not hell, the problem is not that
choice, the problem is all that prevents one from making that choice: the distractions,
the pleasures, the attachments.
According to Eckhart, “We should not content ourselves with a God of thoughts for, when
the thoughts come to an end, so too shall God.
Rather, we should have a living God who is beyond the thoughts of all people and all
creatures.
That kind of God will not leave us, unless we ourselves choose to turn away from him.”